Dasher's punk rock resurrection

Under normal circumstances, a band like Dasher should have already been touring behind their second album by now. In 2014, the then-Atlanta-based band was getting ready to release their debut album when, shortly after wrapping up recordings, they broke up. This left drummer/vocalist Kylee Kimbrough in the frustrating position of having to start from scratch, with the added urgency of having to get a new band ready in time.

Instead of getting the ball rolling as soon as possible, Kimbrough took a different course of action: She pulled up stakes and moved to Bloomington, Indiana. It’s where her label, Jagjaguwar, is located, but more importantly, it’s where her family lives. And due to some personal struggles she had at the same time as the band’s split, it was important for her to have a support system.

“I had lost my entire lineup, which had never happened before,” she says. “It was a lot of stress and a lot of drama. But that gave me this new window to move somewhere, because I could then reform the band but do it in a different city. I needed my family, and my family lives in Indiana.

“Part of what was the big cause was the breakup in the first place,” she adds. “I have since found out that I have high functioning autism, but at the time I didn’t know what was going on. I had been misdiagnosed a lot and I was on a lot of medication I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to take until later. But at the time I was a big mess, and needed to be closer to my parents, who were helping me navigate through that situation. It wasn’t really fair to put all that on my friends, because that’s all I had in Atlanta. Just buddies of mine, no family.”

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Sodium, Dasher’s full-length debut, was finally released in July, and it’s a powerful blast of noisy punk rock. Despite the period of hibernation, it’s a set of music that feels charged and explosive, featuring two-minute anthems rife with psychedelic guitars, pummeling beats and cathartic screams. It’s melodic music and often quite catchy, but there’s a ferocity at the heart of the album that makes it feel more dangerous and on edge than a typical punk album. The album art, which shows Kimbrough pounding away at her drums in a cloud of flour, depicts the energy and urgency of the music pretty accurately.

At no point did Kimbrough ever consider not releasing Sodium. It simply took a little longer to release than she had planned. Yet the unintended consequence of sitting on the recordings was that she ended up writing a lot more music in the meantime—music that she’s itching to complete much sooner than the first record.

“It was awful,” she says. “And it’s also crazy because I’ve written so much since then. That these songs are just now getting out there, and they’re old to me, I don’t even want to play them a lot anymore. I’m always trying to play catch up.”

Kimbrough has since reassembled Dasher with a new set of musicians: bassist Gary Magilla and guitarists Steve Garcia and Derek McCain. Over the past year, they’ve been working on enough material to complete a second album, though Kimbrough says she discards as much material as she ends up keeping. So while she actually might have written enough songs for two more albums, half of them ultimately didn’t live up to her high standards, which she admits can be frustrating for the other members of the band.

“I make my own little demos and decide if I want to keep it,” she says. “I’m not playing anything that I don’t 100 percent like. I’ve written some stuff and taken it to the band, and then just all of a sudden cut it and my bandmates get upset because they’ve already learned it. If I’m not stoked, I won’t play it. I don’t want any filler bullshit.”

Dasher are finally back on stage and on the road, able to support a record that took far longer than expected to make it to listeners’ headphones. And with any luck, it won’t take nearly as much time before another set of music makes its way to the public. The important thing for Kimbrough, however, is the ability to keep playing live. She’s quick to point out, however, that live music is her method of catharsis no matter who else is in the room with her.

“That’s my favorite thing to do is play music live, whether it’s at practice or in front of people,” she says. “I think it’s my way of getting my wiggles out. I don’t know if it’s important...in terms of whether other people see that—not necessarily. But it’s important to me to do it, because it helps me mentally. Whether I’m on stage or in my basement, it doesn’t matter who’s looking.”